This project is deprecated. Please visit the nucleus-data-server repository for our latest work.

Neon Overview

Neon is a software platform designed to help you, as a developer, to integrate your disparate visualization widgets with your data stores. The Data Access API makes it easy for widgets to query NoSQL databases directly from JavaScript or RESTful endpoints, while still letting the server do the heavy lifting. The Interaction API provides capabilities for inter-widget communication, which easily links your widgets together. Neon does not provide any user interface components. Instead, Neon shines under-the-hood by removing the pressure from developers to figure out how to make different components work together and allowing them to focus more on the fun stuff, like creating valuable data exploration applications and workflows.

View an example application

To see an example of what's possible with Neon, check out the Neon Geo Temporal Dashboard. You can see it running on our demo server running an Neon Geo Temporal Dashboard Demo built with Neon. Originally part of this project, it has been spun off to a sister project and is meant to be deployed as a separate web application alongside core Neon. Read more about how to use it and how it interacts with Neon here.

Quick Start: Build and run the example

Building the example application requires Java JDK 1.7 or 1.8, node.js, and MongoDB. To install everything you need on Ubuntu 14.04, run

sudo apt-get install git openjdk-7-jdk mongodb unzip npm nodejs-legacy

On Fedora 20, run

sudo yum install git unzip mongodb mongodb-server java-1.7.0-openjdk-devel npm
sudo systemctl start mongod

On Windows, you will need to download and install each requirement separately and ensure that the JDK, Mongo, and Git bin directories are on your path.

With the prerequisites out of the way, drop to a command prompt, get Neon and give it a basic configuration:

 git clone https://github.com/NextCenturyCorporation/neon.git
 cd neon/
 cp gradle.properties.sample gradle.properties

Then import the example data into a MongoDB collection:

 cd examples
 unzip earthquakes.zip
 mongoimport --db test --collection earthquakes --type csv --headerline --stopOnError --file earthquakes.csv
 mongo test --eval "db.earthquakes.find().forEach(function(doc){doc.time = new ISODate(doc.time);db.earthquakes.save(doc)});"
 cd ..

Finally, build and run the Neon server using Jetty. The following command will launch a test web server on port 8080:
```
 ./gradlew jettyRun -Pmongo.host=localhost
```

Point your web browser at http://localhost:8080/neon/examples and select one of the single page example files to view a simple query, filter, or database listing. If they display the earthquake data listed above, you have successfully configured your development environment. If you have another web server running on that port, you may need to shut it down prior to the Jetty command.

3 (alternate). Deploying Neon. If you are using Tomcat, you can use that web container instead of Jetty. Run the following command to create a Neon war file:

    ./gradlew war

Copy the Neon war file to your Tomcat directory webapps:

    cp ./neon-server/build/libs/neon-1.1.0-SNAPSHOT.war [tomcat]/webapps

To view the examples, copy the [neon-dir]/examples/*.html file to the [tomcat]/webapps/ directory. If the Tomcat server is not running on port 8080, then the examples will need to be changed so that the Neon.js file can be found. Modify the line:

    <script src="http://localhost:8080/neon/js/neon.js"></script>

to point to the appropriate port.

Next Steps

Building your First Neon Application
Consult the Neon Wiki for more detailed requirements, build, and deployment notes
Check out the Neon-GTD project, a sample analysis dashboard built on Neon. You can see a sample dashboard with earthquake data here.
Visit http://neonframework.org for the latest Neon news, downloads and API documents.

Apache 2 Open Source License

Neon and Neon-GTD are made available by Next Century under the Apache 2 Open Source License. You may freely download, use, and modify, in whole or in part, the source code or release packages. Any restrictions or attribution requirements are spelled out in the license file. Neon and Neon-GTD attribution information can be found in the LICENSE.TXT file and licenses folder in each of the Neon Git Repository and Neon-GTD Git Repository. For more information about the Apache license, please visit the The Apache Software Foundation’s License FAQ.

Additional Information

Email: neon-support@nextcentury.com

Website: http://neonframework.org